Liverpool vs Southampton: A Micro-Drama for a Macro-Mess By our man in the cheap seats, wondering if the apocalypse has VAR The planet is busy imploding—ice shelves calving like bored royals, shipping lanes turning into jacuzzis, and democracy being auctioned off between smartphone notifications—yet for ninety-odd minutes on a damp English Saturday, a reasonable slice…
Gabriel Jesus and the Portable Messiah Complex By Our Man in São Paulo, still waiting for the Second Coming (or at least a decent corner kick) RIO DE JANEIRO — On a continent where the word “jesus” is more often seen on cathedral façades than football shirts, Gabriel Jesus has spent the better part of…
The American Football Coach, the Global Catharsis, and the Collapsing Empire We All Pretend to Ignore By “Still Employed” Correspondent, filed from a Copenhagen hotel that still charges for Wi-Fi Ted Lasso, the fictional Kansas-born optimist who once coached Wichita State to a middling bowl game and now ministers to fictional AFC Richmond, has become…
NBC Sports, the Peacock’s brash younger cousin who insists on showing up to every global shindig wearing a tailored blazer and a foam finger, has spent the last three decades perfecting the art of selling Americans the rest of the planet’s favorite pastimes—then apologizing afterward for the commercials. From the Tokyo Olympics’ cardboard beds to…
The Fixture List as Geopolitical Weather Report By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between the Etihad and the end of history It begins, as all modern catastrophes do, with a PDF. At 09:00 BST precisely, Manchester City’s 2024-25 fixture list drops onto millions of phones from Lagos to Lahore, each ping a tiny…
**The Global Ballet of Aston Villa Fixtures: How Birmingham’s Football Schedule Quietly Rules the World** While diplomats in Geneva debate the fate of nations and central bankers adjust interest rates with the gravitas of cardiac surgeons, an arguably more consequential calendar quietly dictates the emotional rhythms of millions: Aston Villa’s fixture list. Yes, that Aston…
**The Global Ejaculate: How Semenyo Became the World’s Most Unlikely Geopolitical Football** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear codes and trade agreements typically steal the spotlight, it’s refreshing—if slightly disturbing—to watch the world lose its collective mind over a 24-year-old Ghanaian winger whose surname sounds like a medical condition you’d rather not…
Old Trafford, 20:30 GMT. Somewhere in Lagos, a generator coughs to life so the bar won’t miss kickoff; in Manila, a call-centre shift extends its “comfort break”; and in the souks of Marrakech, the argan-oil guy flips his phone to an illegal stream while the tourist haggles, oblivious. Manchester United versus Arsenal is no longer…
The Amex Stadium, a glass-and-steel bauble nestled between the English Channel and the South Downs, will host what the Premier League’s marketing department calls “a seismic six-pointer” between Brighton & Hove Albion and West Ham United. Seismic is a relative term: outside the EU’s post-Brexit customs bubble, tectonic plates are shifting in Ukraine, Taiwan, and…
The Chelsea vs Leicester City fixture, a quaint Midlands-London pas de deux, has quietly become the Premier League’s own Rorschach test for the global order. Watch it from a café in Lagos where the generator coughs like an asthmatic goalkeeper and you’ll see a morality play about inherited privilege versus insurgent hustle. Stream it in…
The gentle art of watching Premier League clubs court a 22-year-old Londoner who still looks like he’s borrowing his dad’s suit reached new levels of geopolitical absurdity this week. Cole Palmer—Chelsea’s resident smirk-wearing, left-footed chaos generator—has reportedly become Manchester United’s latest object of desire, a move that, on the surface, is about football but, beneath…
The Bournemouth–Newcastle Rivalry, or How a Seaside Town and a Former Mining Hub Accidentally Became Emblems of Late-Stage Capitalism By Santiago “Sam” Delgado, International Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker It began, as all modern catastrophes do, on a spreadsheet. In 2009, AFC Bournemouth—then languishing in League Two, a division so obscure that even its own highlights package…
